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Funding Alert: Classplus raises $1.6 M Pre-Series A Fund

Edtech startup Classplus has raised $1.6 million in its pre-series A funding round led by Times Internet and GREE Ventures. The round also saw participation from Japanese VC firm Spiral Ventures and existing investor Netherlands-based Rising Stars Fund.

Launched in January 2018 by Mukul Rustagi and Bhaswat Agarwal, Classplus is a mobile-first SaaS platform that enables private coaching institutes and their tutors to streamline their content distribution, payments, communication, and online assessments through the app. Tutors can conduct online assessments on the app and identify students’ learning gaps and track their performance over a period of time.

Within 15 months of its launch, the company has built a base with over 1200 coaching centers as its clients across 50-plus Indian cities, it said in a statement. Classplus plans to use the funds to expand its product offerings, ramp up its leadership team and scale operations. The firm also plans to leverage data science and enable predictive analysis on their assessment scores.

“We feel that the wave of internet penetration and smartphone access has opened up opportunities for tutor-led, tech-enabled learning. ClassPlus has topped the segment with coaching centers using our mobile SaaS for their classroom courses as well as to distribute text and video learning modules online,” said Mukul Rustagi, CEO, Classplus.

Adding to this, Yasuhiro Seo, Founding Partner, Spiral Ventures, said the Indian coaching segment is a $20 billion market. “While there are a lot of firms working towards directly providing students with study material online, Classplus has taken a unique stand of empowering teachers with technology, which makes their business model scalable,” he added.

Other deals in ed-tech space

Last week, venture capital firm Matrix Partners led an investment round in Pesto, which runs a career accelerator for software engineering talent in the country.

In March this year, Byju’s raised $31.3 million in a fresh round of funding led by existing investors General Atlantic and Tencent Holdings. Last December, South African technology conglomerate Naspers led a $540-million (Rs 3,855 crore then) investment round in Byju’s.

Around the same time, quiz-based learning ed-tech startup iChamp raised pre-Series A funding in a round led by Raju Shukla, chief executive officer at Singapore-based Ariana Investment Management.

In the same month, eShiksa, a startup that helps educational institutions manage their digital operations, raised funding from Mumbai-based investment firm Mentor Capital as part of an extended seed round.

In December 2018, Toppr, another well-funded ed-tech startup, raised $35 million (Rs 245 crore then) in a Series C funding round from new and previous investors.